Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Old new socks of the mysterious variety

I found these photos on a long lost SD card. After updating the details on Ravelry, I thought I'd add them to the blog too. Particularly since this quilt blog has yet to mention anything other than food. Fiber is a small step in the right direction!

Last fall when I had plenty of other things on my plate, Kirsten Kapur offered up another fabulous mystery sock pattern for Socktober. Granted, I didn't know for sure that it was fabulous since it was a mystery, but her patterns are generally interesting to knit, have nice details, and are well written, so I grabbed some Lorna's Laces (of course) and jumped in.

Unlike my usual method of knitting both socks at once starting from the toe, these started off being knit separately, and started at the cuff. I should have stuck with a tried-and-true stretchy cast on but something possessed me to try out something new (Double Estonian CO, not sure where I found it), and of course it was not nearly stretchy enough to get over my heel. I'm not sure why I continued knitting despite this obvious and major issue, but I did. All the way up to Amherst, MA, and all through that weekend at UMass.

The weekend also included a pilgrimage to Webs. I hadn't been there since the mid 90s, when my weaving class went there to pick out yarn. At the time, I had no idea how big Webs was - we just went into the coned yarns section, made our selections and left! This time around, I tried to savour the experience a bit more, armed with researched lists of things I wanted to look at, touch, and possibly buy, but it was still a little overwhelming!

Back to the socks...

I was loving how fast the single sock was knitting up, and the pattern was definitely just the right mix of interesting and memoriseable. I substituted my usual eye of partridge heel which fits me better on a cuff-down sock, and once the foot was started, I put both socks onto one needle to avoid the dreaded (and inevitable) Second Sock Syndrome!

What is interesting is that whenever I knit socks on my own, they take me a lot longer to finish, but when I join a mystery KAL, somehow the socks seem to just knit themselves. A couple years ago I churned out two pairs in a month! While doing other things! It must be the sense of competition and urgency that I get, even though these are not about who finishes first and who made the most pairs!

Sadly, these socks sat in the closet for a year because the inelastic cast on edge was awful and I was too mad at myself to look at the socks. Eventually, I dug them out, unpicked the cast on and the first section of the cuff, reknit the cuff in k1p1 rib for 1" and bound off with the fantastic JSSBO. NOW these socks are finally wearable and even the weather is finally cool enough for me to wear them without feeling too sheepish. Sheepish... hehe!